Samsung looking ahead to carrier-subsidized 'connected cameras'

Dpreview is in Seoul, South Korea, with Samsung. As is usually the case, most of our discussions with senior executives have been off-the-record, but we'll be publishing the interesting extracts from our conversations we can cover in the coming days and weeks. For now though, Sunhong Lim - VP Sales & Marketing in Samsung's Digital Imaging division, spoke at length to dpreview and a small group of other journalists about his vision of Samsung's role in shaping the future of cameras as mobile communication devices.

'Customers are looking for a total solution'

Of all the major camera manufacturers, Samsung is making perhaps the most concerted effort to introduce smartphone-like features into its camera lineup. Several of its 2012 models feature WiFi connectivity, and some, like the innovative flip-screen MV800, utilize a distinctly 'app-like' graphic user interface. We asked Lim what the future holds.

Although he wouldn't be drawn on specific plans (at least not on record) Lim told us that he believes 'customers are looking for a total solution for their images, not only capturing pictures but editing and sharing. We want to provide this solution, but in order to realize this vision the camera must be connected. This is why we are adding WiFi to our camera lineup [in 2012]'.

'Once people experience the technology they love it'

We asked Lim whether it is difficult to educate consumers in the benefits of a so-called connected-camera. He said it is, but only for certain demographics. 'The technology is brand new' he explained, 'and so is the experience. Our prime target consumers are young people because they are connected, and well-exposed to [this sort of] technology. After we've targeted those consumers we will expand our target market'.Lim went on - 'in order to educate the experience is key. Once people experience the technology they love it and once they love it, then they buy it'.

The WB150F is capable of connecting to WiFi networks and Android smartphones, allowing you to view and share images on a wide variety of devices, as well as email and social networking websites.

The 'experience' that Lee mentions is the experience of using Samsung's newest compacts as connected devices, capable of allowing images to be edited and shared straight from the camera. Once connected, Samsung's latest WiFi-equipped compact cameras, like the WB150F allow users to email images and share them on Facebook straight from the camera. The same technology allows photographers to browse images from their camera directly to a WiFi-equipped AllShare or DLNA enabled television, and to an Android smartphone via Samsung's MobileLink app.

'Cameras will have the same processing power as smartphones'

At present, smartphones pack more processing power than cameras, but as a consequence they also cost more. Is not unusual for unsubsidized smartphones, with their powerful processors and plentiful in-built memory to cost upwards of $500.

We asked Lim whether he envisages digital cameras with the same processing power as modern phones in the future. Right now, he explained, 'semiconductor firms are feeding the demand for smartphones because the market is so much bigger [than it is for cameras]'. That said, Lim predicts that 'in a year or two cameras will have the same processing power and memory as smartphones'.

'Non-connected devices will be meaningless'

Although he would go on record with any comments on the possibility of cameras being released with mobile operating systems and built-in 3G/4G connectivity, we asked Lim whether he envisages so called 'connected cameras' being subsidized by wireless carriers in the future, in the same way as smartphones are today.

'In the future, maybe', Lim told us. 'Right now people use phones more than cameras. But once the cloud computing era truly dawns, a non-connected device will be meaningless. In that case, the camera will need real-time connectivity, and [carriers] are looking for devices like this'.

'Many companies' he went on, are developing cloud services, 'but right now there aren't many devices [connecting] to that cloud. Photos and videos are the main data traffic generator, so carriers are naturally very interested in the [concept of a] connected camera. [Carrier-subsized] business models may appear in the near future. The technology is there now but we need to wait for the business model to make sense.'

Asked for his personal opinion, Lim predicted 'it will come very soon'.

Comments

A solution in search of a problem. While they have designed out the minor inconvenience of downloading your camera's photos to your computer, are people going to pay significantly more for that? Or pay a monthly subscription fee? Not to mention the shorter battery life and limited applications. IT people know the cloud is already yesterday's technology, it has largely come and gone in favor of virtualization.

Non-connected devices will be meaningless? It isn't a connected device, it's a camera. camera. camera. camera. The people thay buy cameras want you to get that right first. Can you please just do that.

"But once the cloud computing era truly dawns, a non-connected device will be meaningless" Well remember, this statement comes from a Sales and Marketing exec. so the statement is meant to market an idea and be provocative, even if it is exaggerating. Cameras and other gadgets will certainly not become obsolete just because they are not connected 24/7.

It should be all about consumer choice. I think cloud connectivity is a welcome addition on a camera to memory cards and USB cables, as long as you can "go offline" too if desired. I would never buy a camera in which the only means of transferring files is via the cloud, but if I can choose to do it that way, or to just transfer to my own computer from the memory card then that would be nice.

Do you know what? The worst thing is that the guy from Samsung is serious. With a straight face he can say such things as "a non connected devices is going to be obsolete". Is he talking about my washing machine, dishing machine or motor saw. Or my vacuum cleaner? Or what? Is this guy for real? Maybe it is he that is obsolete?

Lets see. You are in South America, up in the Andes and you are taking images. Or no? I forgot - all devices are connected - so this one does only have a 5 GB buffer for storing temporary before uploading to the net. No flash card slot. Right! But ... ops ... the net ... 6000 meter up in the Andes. No net. Big Fail!

Hmmm ... try to buy some throw away film based camera in the next village. OK! Good plan! Hmmm .. 20 images in each camera. Also buy a HUGE bag to carry cameras.

A network connection was the last thing I looked for in a computer spec not so many years ago - I could not see the need. My PC did everything I needed it to do, the internet scarcely existed, ethernet was something business used to network their machines. I could not imagine a need.

Truth be told, my PC still can do all those things it ever used to do all those years ago, but I would not dream of having a PC sans network connection now.

One day you will be able to interrogate the contents of your fridge remotely, generate a shopping list, press the go button on your phone and have all your shopping delivered or ready for collection. The idea of scratching your head to draw up a shopping list, going to the shops, coming back to discover you are out of milk, it will all seem so unnecessary.

With IPv6 everything can have its own IP address, everything can be connected. Stop thinking how I did when I had my first PC and start imagining the possibilities.

exactly right - and if you are not looking for a camera with 'cloud' connection the same thing applies now, or soon will. That is the exact point I was trying to make - thank you for saying in one sentence what I failed to make clear in 4 paragraphs!

Nope, you're still missing the point, to the best of my knowledge no one here objects to the idea of a camera with the possibility of a web connection.

It's the enforced web connection being the only way to get photos off of the camera that is the disastrous proposition and raises so much ire.

Look my current laptop may very well have a web connection, but I don't use that web connection to edit photos or do CAD drawings, etc. And that's not going to change without my below proposals for VR goggles, which ain't going to happen.

Put differently: It appears to be news to you that people use things called applications on a computer to do work that is not immediately uploaded to some server somewhere.

Right now Realplayer15 is playing Bach WAV files from my C drive. It will remain very difficult to do that same activity off a server for the foreseeable future. (Unless you know of very secret, and nearly fully developed, gear which is about to be released for public use.)

read some more and also reread those talking about exclusively built-in memory in these comments.

you also missed where early in these comments I said I didn't have any particular problem with a camera with a quick upload feature as long as there's no forced subscription fee.

in fact the iPhone is part of the way there, no card slot, must use apple software to move data to say a laptop or one must upload the photos--at least I believe the iPhone has a wifi feature.

sony, nikon, canon, samsung, olympus, etc would all be laughed out of the camera business if they'd done what apple did with the fixed battery and fixed memory.

Samsung saying "non connected means obsolete" more than kinda of suggests enforced uploads. The problem is the use of the word "obsolete", because that very much implies that other camera systems won't work without a "cloud" connection.

so you are actually shooting down Samsung's vision of the future because you would take issue with "enforced web connection being the only way to get photos off of the camera" - something which is never actually mentioned or even hinted at in the original article?

Well never mind, since criticising the article over something it never suggested is futile anyway. What pains me throughout the comments is the general reflex that the whole "cloud connected" idea is plain stupid, won't work, too expensive, adds nothing useful, no good for 'serious' photogs, etc

Stop pretending that Samsung said: We're going to try putting WiFi and a 4G card in some digital cameras because we think adding quick wireless upload capacity is something people will use. Samsung said no such thing, they stupidly went on about non web connected systems being obsolete and even more stupidly went off on the "carrier subsidized" track.

FYI: carrier subsidized and built in memory almost assure enforced web connection and the carrier subsidized part most certainly implies a fee.

Note that the guy said devices - not cameras. He said non connected devices will be obsolete. I dont really know what devices he is talking about, but I have heard this claim several times for many years. And the driving force is IPv6. And yes - with IPv6 you can personally have billions of IP addresses or trillions. Th question is only - why? At the same time, the same people claims we are going to unify our devices into one, our camera-phone-computer-whatever. Lots of guesses. We will see what happens. ----- It is though rather clear to me that a camera without network connectivity is perfectly useful - if only the companies lets us buy one. Let us hope this mad future forecast is not going to be fulfilled.

It is not a high priority for my camera to be connected to the "cloud". Forget about the Andes. I PPall of my photos in lightroom - which is on a computer, which is connected to the internet cloud. After I PP my images, then I might think of uploading a few of them to FB or G+. If I don't care about the quality of an image, I just shoot it with my camera phone. But if I care (which is most of the time), I will shoot with my dslr and PP.

I'm a little surprised by the amount of push-back I read in the comments. People seem to be denying the present: iPhones now take more photos combined that all photos taken since the invention of photography. And the quality is getting better,there's no escaping this. Next is the issue of connectivity: looking at phones, tablets, computers, even cars, all these point to more and greater connectivity as we move forward, not less. The union of such a high tech device as a camera with internet technology has to me been too long coming. Witness the extreme surge of shared images once a decent phone camera came out. Long-time Professional photographers like me, have watched with horror how our "serious" work is being flooded by iPhone and other images. But it's inescapable, we've turned the corner, and though there will always be room for high quality work, NOTHING says it cannot be done with a small well connected device such as a phone. Can regular "cameras" catch up now? It will happen.

At a time when the telcos are clamping down on 'unlimited data' plans, I really, really doubt they feel a need to drive more demand for usage of the service. Furthermore, personally, I find most (of my own) photographs are improved by at least a little photo-processing. No way that is happening on the small LCD display on the back of a camera. At minimum it will wait until the pictures have been loaded onto a desktop/laptop with a decent sized - and calibrated - screen, plus available WiFi.

i agree, i dont realy think that wireless conectivity is vital, however, i would like the option of taging a picture directly on a social network from my camera threw wifi and even better threw 3g network.

Of course. But I have never claimed that no one wants a suiss army knife. I just said that a suiss army knife does not make scissors, knives and screw drivers obsolete. Like this strange man at Samsung did. He claimed that non connected cameras will be obsolete. Does anyone agree?

But what if the swiss army knife does well enough in non-emergency situations to satisfy the vast majority of shoppers, and therefore economy of scale simply causes scissors to become a premium niche product used only by seamstresses and professional custom greeting card designers? And the scissor companies react by no longer skimping on materials, and raising the price, and reducing availability in department stores?

A tablet/smart phone OS in a professional camera? It'd be the ultimate System Camera. Buy whatever add-on functions you want/need, from whatever developer is smart enough to come up with them.

If I could use existing smart phone "toys" like stop-motion animation apps with a professional-grade camera? Duh! Add the ability to pre-program camera moves - zoom and track focus, with integrated control of an outboard, motorized pan head via Bluetooth? Smooth! More than a few wildlife photographers (and private investigators) would be delighted to have a low-cost system for monitoring and controlling one or more remote cameras via iPhone from the comfort of their favorite watering hole.

The real problem for the camera makers is that, once control of the camera is opened to outside apps, it's harder for them to differentiate one model from the next. But maybe we'd be able to use a hot, new Nikon-made app on a Canon body.

In principle I agree. It would be fun to be able to use apps on your camera. Or even write your own apps. I am somewhat sceptical though. The interface to the camera functions might not be so open so you can do all that much. All you might be able to do is to upload and twitter about your images :)

Moreover - you will need a 5 inch screen on the phone. Which makes it clumsy.

I think Samsung is completely missing the point. Like Apple, they have somehow concluded that most people want to share their unsorted, unedited photos via the internet. Perhaps some do, but only clueless snapshooters.

The more serious issue is that Samsung wants their customers to upload more photos, but carriers want to charge for every micro-bit of data that is uploaded. What is their motivation to subsidize the uploading of photos to Facebook or Flickr? Not gonna happen, not without a bitter struggle. The carriers are shamelessly fleecing their customers; and, so far, customers are not complaining—not nearly loud enough, at any rate. Somebody (maybe Apple) has to figure out how to break the carriers' stranglehold on the movement of data to and from the cloud.

The Sigma DP2 is a nice machine, but you can't mount other lenses on it, use it above ISO800, like the Samsung NXes one can't realistically shoot jpegs with the Sigma, and until very recently the horrid Sigma software was the only way of doing raw extraction.

Except for a problematic jpeg engine:The Samsung NXes can do all of these things, and their autofocus is better than those DP Sigmas.

I'm sure our government will be delighted with this. Not only will they be monitoring what we say on the 'phone & write in our emails, soon they will be adding what we photograph to their records as well ... for our own security, of course.

@howaboutraw : i think in all your coolness you missinterpreted the avid homepage, and now think that avid is an application, while the application you meant is "media composer" by avid, just like "pro tools" by avid ;)

If you are still there talking to Samsung please could you ask them about underwater housings. If there was something like a Patima housing for the NX200 I would have bought one by now, whether I can send emails from it or not. That wouldn't work underwater anyway. Thanks

So a camera phone, or a phone camera? I don't know, i feel that the idea of a "catch all"-machine is pretty dated. Sure, we have lots of stuff in our phones today, and I guess we could put a lot more stuff in our cameras. But there are good reasons to separate the devices, battery time and ergonomics for instance. I doubt a camera that is actually comfortable to use, and that gives good enough results, is acutally possible to combine with an android device/phone at this stage.

I didn't realise anybody was suggesting talking into your DSLR. I thought the idea was that your camera was connected 'the cloud', nothing at all to do with telephones. And Android is just an OS, much used on telephones but equally capable of other non-telephone uses.

Samsung makes many "connected" Android devices that are not phones. They have WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, a camera, but no cell phone connection. Screen sizes available are 4, 5, 7, and 10 inches. Some are called tablets, some called media players.

Well, I think that having in your pocket a quality compact camera able to perfectly replace your smart-phone (or vice-versa) is very desirable indeed. Which means that REALLY compact cameras and smartphones are no doubt going to merge into one device. It doesn't mean that you are going to talk into your MILC or DSLR, though !! Convergency will merge devices designed to fit into your pocket, its aim being quite the opposite to creating duplicates. Fine compact cameras will totally merge into smarthphones just like fine mp3 players already merged into mobiles.

practically speaking, Samsung is talking about making wifi a standard feature on the camera. For me personally, I don't see smartphones getting cameras that would make me give up a decent compact, nevermind my dsrls. The iphone 4s and the nokia offerings have made the phone camera usable, but it's still single focal range and limited by the size of the lens. That problem doesn't go away.

Unfortunately, the cell carriers don't want to make it easy (without paying) to use your cell phone as the uplink for the camera, and I don't see cheap cell connections likely in the near future to make it viable to put on every camera. Amazon did it for their kindles, but that was to allow them to sell to you. And even they now sell wiifi only models.

Not nonsense and not at all unrealistic. Seeing how fast connectivity has grown and continues to grow I'd be surprised if not almost every electronic device will be connected within 5-10 years. And Martin, I fail to see how we could become "over saturated". Is there any kind of drawback to having a camera that don't require you to connect to another device to get the actual pictures out of it?

When I can upload, at anytime, anywhere in the world, in 5 minutes, a terabyte off of my mobile device then you may have point, though that mobile device would have to support serious editing/extraction software and a screen large enough to see the edits.

Connectedness of course is incredibly useful. I use Flickr and I use email. I do not yet own an iphone but I might soon.BUT I see here that there is a deep misunderstanding by some participants on this thread about what is meaningful in photography.Photography may be a social mediium, may be a career where customers require a defined quality output, may be fine art where images are hung on gallery walls next to watercolour, Acrylic and oil paintings. These are all valid and meanigful forms. The much vauted coming of Cloud photography does not automatically make all other expressions of photography somehow outdated or less valid. I suspect it is the immature psyche that would contend this to be so - the arrogance of youth that sees newer as better and anything that is old to be discarded.Connectivity and the Cloud are just more strings to the photographic bow, not a revolution to create dinosaurs of great artistic and technical traditions.

The 'connectivity' of computers is something that has very craftily crept up on us. Not so long ago one was not constantly connected to the web- you had to make a conscious decision to connect- now connection is automatic. Goodness knows what is going on behind our backs as unknown entities crawl around our systems.

DSLR video, "connected" cameras etc etc.....does nobody just like to shoot in a studio anymore ? Standard hight quality DSLR, that all I need...just something that takes a good picture....I don't want geo tagging, Facebook upload or any other modern rubbish.......It's enough to make you go back to film !!

Even in a studio connectivity would be useful. Have the camera automatically send the shots to an off-site customer for approval, easier then currently to connect to a computer etc. It surely wouldn't be a drawback in any case.

By connecting the ipad to your computer, a computer with itunes on it, that's how you download photos from your ipad.

Thank you for reminding everyone here of the inherent weakness in the ipad system, and check out the new very fast Samsung (Samsung quel irony) Intel Core i5 Windows 7 tablet--it mostly destroys the ipad.

The problem is the same wireless carriers are all complaining that they are out of bandwidth and have ot charge more for their data plans. So what you are telling me is I am supposed to send all of my photos from a 45+Mp camera over a wireless carrier that can not handle Angry Birds?

Why would I want a "connected" compact camera - when I already have an iPhone?

And meanwhile, would I really want to be paying £15 per GB of 3G usage with an SLR that tried uploading every 14-bit, 36-megapixel RAW file (64Mb each) that I shoot to some "cloud" server? That would equate to about £1 per shutter press. NUTS.

The "cloud" exists for ONE purpose only - to MAKE MONEY for Cloud Operators.

So we're supposed to shoot at a useless size for printing and in a format useless for colour and exposure adjustment, just to a satisfy the data restrictions of cell phone carriers?

Why not just shoot with a cell phone?

Frankly it's really insulting to see claims about what others will or won't do with raw files they've shot. Also the word is extract, editing is done to things like tiff files; that's how the raw files are preserved.

Show some imagination. The data upload does not have to be instant, nor even near instant. The data transmission can be managed, maybe trickled over night or any other periods of low usage, to optimise the carriers bandwidth usage over time, smooth out the valleys, make rent out of the available bandwidth otherwise wasted. They don't have to charge the same rates for that kind of low-priority asynchronous traffic which is just exploiting unused waste bandwidth. It is all extra marginal revenue so they could charge next to nothing and still be in profit from the exercise.As to the cloud existing to MAKE MONEY...shock! Of course companies all exist to make a profit - or did they give you your camera for free? What is wrong with that?

HowaboutRAW: Definatly. I've said it before in a thread, but here it goes again. The wast majority of all photos today are viewed on screen and distributed by web. Capturing pictures in higher resolutions than this is a curiosity at best, for specialist uses in very specific situations. Thus, connectivity and hopefully openness to third party software would be much more of a quantum leap in a camera than ultra resolution which in most cases won't ever be seen even by the photographer herself since most photos never get's printer and when they do it's at a size where the resolution makes no real difference.

Well not sure that's true if you count ads in say a printed magazine, which are still read.

Anyhow, I'm not saying that you can't capture low res jpegs, what I'm saying is why not simply use your current cellphone to do that? Some actually care about photo quality, is it news that McDonald's doesn't server good hamburgers even if that company servers the most?

Most still photos recorded on film were never printed either--does that mean film and camera quality didn't matter?

Wetsleet has the right idea. It may be that we'll have to prioritize our uploads to the Cloud - choose instant, high-priced service when immediacy is important, or low-priority, off-hours uploads, like a computer backup service. Telecommunications networks operate 24/7, and the more densely we pack them with data, the cheaper data becomes for us all.

Whether it's a computer or a digital camera, painless, constant back-up to an off-site server makes a ton of sense. I shoot travel. If my work could be backed up automatically, whenever I came within range of a compatible cell network? No brainer. Much better than waiting to get to the next hotel or Internet cafe.

HowaboutRAW: So you mean to say that the only benefit of shooting with a DSLR over a cell phone is higher resolution? Even that isn't true anymore given Nokias introduction of a high MP phone. Note that I'm not saying people want bad pictures, just that most of the time they don't need very high resolution and data size is an important factor. A DSLR can shoot better pictures than a mobile phone even at the same resolution given it's larger sensor, better AF, ergonomics, interchangeable lenses, flash possibilities etc. Now having all that, and the ability to distribute images as easily as a phone would be supremely useful for many many people.

I have heard this total solution talk now since 1980 or something like that.

The latest home entertainment solution I bought was a mess. My wife totally refuses to even touch it - so we have a make fix solution now and the central hub is almost always off. And although it was expensive, I think the only thing I can do is bin it.

Total solutions is a dream.

OK - sometimes you get some kind of integrated thing. The iPad is a rather good book reading gadget, good image viewer, lousy image editor, a non working phone and a lousy computer and a not so good camera. And that is considered some kind of success.

When I put my digital camera in my camera collection and only uses connected devices to make images - then Samsung can come back and say - "what did we say in 2012?"

Your home entertainment system may have been the consumer electronics world's equivalent of a T-Rex, an overdeveloped creature that dies if there are no big dino carcasses to scavenge.

Little "smart phone" or "tablet," on the other hand, are the total solution the reptile world refused to imagine would ever amount to more than fuzzy shrews.

Apple and Samsung are on something of a roll. Camera sales are flat, falling, or cannibalizing eachother. At most, two "serious" camera firms are making money. Some gators and turtles did survive the collapse of the Cretaceous too.

You mean like iPad - the perfect phone, computer, camera, image viewer, image editor and book reader? Oh - I forgot - of those it only reads books and browses images good - the rest is cr@p. Ah - forget it.

Roland: Your opinion of these devices are not shared by the market it seems, as they are massively successful. And in any case, could you, or anyone else explain to me what the drawbacks would be of having a connected DSLR? At worst it's a feature you don't use, realistically though, most people would find uses for it.

Why would you upload 50 MB images? For web sharing you don't need that kind of resolution, so a device like this should naturally facilitate automatic downsizing for web. And like I said in another post, most pictures today are never viewed outside a computer screen and thus huge files with massive resolution is generally not that important.

And sure, you may think you don't need connectivity, I mean, 15 years ago there where people who couldn't understand why they needed anything better than a modem for connecting their computer. Let me just throw one use out there: The moment you get home and into your wifi all images are automatically transferred to your computer and imported into LR/Aperture. And if you shoot in your studio, same thing, the pictures go to your computer right away. Useless? Not really. And like I said, even if you never use it, how is it a drawback?

The business model will depend on the camera owner paying for his/her own wifi connection and the related bandwidth considerations.-I am wireless now and have my own cloud: Eye-fi card & my own web site.This incliudes my D70000, my D5000 and my Samsung TL500.

Not to knock the idea but they should mention the required cost for a wifi connection to make it work.

The irony is that Samsung have not even bothered to bring decent connectivity together in the products they already have, instead they're providing components for main rivals Apple to do just that in the near future. My TV should be my hi-fi and have a dock for my Mp3 player/HD video camera, and should be linked wirelessly to my media centre and external storage, which should all be remotely controlled by my phone/tablet. (As just one theoretical example - there are plenty of others) That was all doable years ago and should be absolute standard, but Samsung sell their products individually with precious little interplay between them - compare the Samsung store in London to the Apple store, and it's an enormous missed opportunity. If they want leverage in the camera market they should be selling packages of products, offering cheap cameras with their TVs, phones and laptops, all of which have a good slice of the action, but ensuring first that they're properly integrated.

You dont want that. Tomorrow there will be advances in cameras ... so then your clunky thing is outdated. And tomorrow there is a better game console. So ... then your clunky thing is outdated. Tomorrow there are advances in phone technology. So ... your clunky thing is outdated. You have to rely on the companies making new clunky things that contains everything. They wont!

And some dont care for a game console. And some dont care for a camera. And ... believe me or not ... some dont even care for a mobile phone.

So - the multi thing is a dream. I more often use a knife, a screw driver a pair of scissors than my suiss army knife. The separate things simply are better.

At the other end are their connected large screen TVs. So the cloud is intermediate storage between capturing and distributing images to family and friends. Takes the printed photograph right out of the equation.

Being a WiFi card (or circuitry) rather inexpensive nowadays, often included "for free" in other types of circuit (eg. the one that drives the LCD screen in some cases), and being its weight close to zero, I think that it would be more a matter of "religion" to exclude network connection from cameras.

Yet today I'd appreciate the possibility to transfer digital images to my PC (or other online services) without the need to use cables or remove the SD card from my camera: I think that I'll also give a try to the Eye-Fi technology for this, as my Canon supports it.

Samsung want to make new products and are looking for a USP, and the carriers want to make money from data plans. Notice how the customer doesn't figure in to this at all.

As for automatically backing up your vacation photos while you sleep, I don't think you would get much sleep when you get home and see the size of the bill. My network provider charges for roaming data: £3.07 per MB in EU, £6 per MB outside EU. Which means sending one single 4MB Jpeg from the far east would cost £24. No thanks. Most hotels offer Wifi these days which is likely to be a much cheaper option.

you don't think the data carriers might understand that they can't charge £24 for each photo? Not for long, anyway. The idea here is that new services would evolve, probably even new service providers. Think of the 3G Kindle type of model, nothing to do with your regular mobile phone contract. I think the idea that SIM cards are the sole preserve of Vodafone etc will fade - it will just be an internet service, nothing to do with telephones. And the market will sort out the price, after a few scare stories no doubt.

"you don't think the data carriers might understand that they can't charge £24 for each photo?"

I do a REALLY uncool thing. I shoot RAW because I want 16 bit quality. Yesterday I shot 2.7 gig of photos in 2 hours. If I sent this unedited to the Cloud and wanted by bills to be kept reasonable the carriers would make a HUGE LOSS no matter HOW much they tweak schemes.

You guys just DONT GET IT DO YOU. And I dont suppose you even know what 16 bir photos are.

Where all these ideas fall down is forgetting the nature of our own human weaknesses.

It is fine having all this facility for data storage and manipulation (as that is all it is), but unless one has a very organised mind and have initially put in place suitable indexes that mean something, extracting any of the useful data becomes more complex and difficult.

I'm very logical, but often I have to search my own computer to find a particular file and that is potentially tiny in comparison.

Also, there is more and more concern over access by third parties. It will become ever more difficult to keep your privacy and make decisions over possible future risks (how many times do people regret releasing things into the web?)

Ultimately, the possibilities and nature of the cloud clash with the limitations and nature of us as humans, and such a clash may well bring more problems than solutions.

I agree with your concerns about ending up with a huge mess of unorganised uncatalogged photos (just look at any hotmail account to get an idea).But, with photos geo-tagged and dated automatically by default life becomes much easier. I just need to know that I am looking for photos from my Easter holiday in 2012, or my trip to Columbia, etc, and suddenly the pictures are easy to find. Factor in face recognition as well and most of the heavy lifting has been done.The privacy issues are a concern. But I am equally concerned that if my home was burgled and my NAS/PC was stolen then all my data is in bad hands also. When I travel I could mislay my backup/storage drive, etc. So the privacy issues are not new or unique to the cloud, they just have to be rethought. Personally I would want my data encrypted by the camera before it uploads.

I'm naturally shy of "the cloud" for all the popular reasons - privacy, my data held hostage by a service provider, FBI shutting down my service provider, hacking, etc. But equally I see the advantages of getting rid of that phase between taking a picture and having it stored off-camera, available to view/process/catalogue/share/whatever regardless of my location or whether I have my own laptop to hand.

There are answers to the hostage/FBI problems - just reverse the current backup paradigm and have your local systems download to backup your cloud data. That leaves hacking and privacy, but I've got over that with my banking services - so maybe it will hinge on uber-trustworthy service providers. Maybe even the banks, who mostly have that trust now, will see an opening to leverage their security expertise and reputation for trust with their customers - "we handle all your financial secrets and the keys to your wealth, so trust us with your photos"?

Do you keep all your wealth as jewels in a shoe box under your bed? Do you distrust ATM cards and pay cash only? Is someone tapping your phone? Why do you keep getting tons of ad mail or telemarketing calls? Isn't that an amazingly clear picture of your home on Google earth?

Actually - if you read the post - no, I don't keep my wealth under the bed, I don't distrust ATM cards - read the post, I trust my bank, that is what I said.As to photos being low on the list of priorities, speak for yourself. But if my photos all went up in a puff of smoke I'd be heartbroken. They are irreplaceable. I'd be just as gutted if some punk got hold of them, I'd feel violated. So I need to trust wherever I choose to store them - trust them for safety and for security.

Samsung makes the common mistake to confuse Connectivity with Cloud. I can see why they do, because they don't see how to compete with smart phones otherwise. But that then only explains why they're going to fail.

Before the Cloud is ubiquitous, smart phones will be. And so it is via smart phones and tablets all connectivity to the Cloud will happen. Therefore, a "Cloud enabled" camera will have a "remote viewfinder" APP on the smart phone (something I see Samsung is understanding already), Sync services and other stuff which makes the camera become an augmented service to the personal cloud of devices. Bluetooth 4.0 will be a much more credible scenario for a camera than yet another carrier contract for yet another device I carry with me. If I share, I'll much more likely do via a feature like the iPad/iPhone's new iPhoto and photo journal feature.

Requires the ability to think in "systems". Something which made Apple succeed where others who tried had failed before.

Well, where are the CHEAP dataplans to make this meaningful, when uploading GB of data? Especially when roaming abroad? Backup on holidays would be nice, but there are other solutions (though less convenient).

For those trigger happy people needing instant publicity, use your smartphone for that. The most stupid thing (for now) has to be the netbooks with the OS on the server.

Btw the images I do upload are PP (at least a small bit), and quite a bit of stuff can not be done on a 3 inch screen. But then again, I am certainly belonging to a minority.

BUT I would take a completely sealed camera (à la TS3) without doors and ports with WIFI, large built in memory and inductive charging to avoid any water ingress. Could even be quite a bit larger than the TS3 for better lens, autofocus, EVF and sensor.

And do remember - this is not going to be for free. Once the infra structure is there and almost all use it, a large part of your income is planned to be taken by the companies owning the services. Today you can use the same Photoshop in 10 years - but tomorrow you will have to pay monthly fees. Goodbye freedom!

So ... Samsung has a dream. The cloudy future where we all are connected including our gadgets. And where we have multi gadgets that do several things. And in this future they see themselves as important of course. Samsung is good at gadgets.

And - of course - its going in that direction. But ... how far it will go and what will happen is still written in the stars.

The last weekend I went out with my DSLR and took maybe 200 images. When coming home I downloaded them to my computer. Browsed through them and decided to make something of maybe ten of them. Thats RAW+JPEG images, maybe 50 MB a piece. So - it was 10 GB. It worked seamlessly. Nemas Problemas.

How would that work with the cloud? It has to be uploaded to some cloud service somehow, probably on the fly using 4G. And when getting home - its in the cloud.